Compliance

Most of this list is the vocabulary of proof: die Nachweispflicht, aktenkundig, sich exkulpieren, the words for showing afterwards that a rule was kept. One entry is an idiom, and it is worth knowing because it is how the press talks about the very thing the rules are there to prevent. Die Landschaftspflege is, literally, landscape conservation: hedges cut back, meadows mown, a line in a council budget. In the phrase politische Landschaftspflege the landscape is a political one, and what is being tended is goodwill — steady donations, invitations and small favours to people in office, none of them tied to any particular decision. The figurative use is critical and usually ironic, and it is not a legal term: a charge sheet would name an offence such as die Vorteilsannahme instead. When Landschaftspflege turns up in a headline about a party donation, nobody has been gardening.